System Requirements

The Problem

“Just because you shouldn’t do something, doesn’t mean you can’t”

Plex Server, the sometimes controversial media streaming hub, is a staple of the media diet of many home-brew media centre connoisseurs. I personally keep it installed as a gateway between Smart TV’s and my music/video/photo library as it is a convenient way of getting DLNA support on the network. Where pushed due to lack of Kodi support Plex also gives a consistent alternative front-end user interface.

The problem with Plex Server is that it isn’t quite a “server”. It’s a service, but one that insists on running in the userland (as a tray icon). If you log off from its user account, it shuts down the service and you no longer have a working Plex environment.

Why is this a problem?

At home, the only computers that I have running 24/7 are servers and these are exclusively Hypervisors. I want Plex to be always on, but not to be sharing a with VM performing other duties. Neither do I want it be forced to leave a logged-on VM running that does something else and thus increases the attack vector.

To date, my answer has been to run Plex Server in a Windows 10 VM, but this means consuming a £120+ Windows 10 Pro license so that it can effectively molly-coddle a tray icon.

Ah ha! I hear you cry. How is consuming a £900 Windows Server license any better?

It’s not, obviously… unless you’ve got Windows Server Data Centre licenses. If you fall into this category, it literally doesn’t matter how many VMs you install on your hypervisor. The argument is academic as long as your have the horsepower on your server to keep piling on additional VMs.

More commonly however, and perhaps more practically. You may find that you have some old Windows Server 2012, 2012 R2 or 2016 Standard licenses knocking around from recent server decommissions. This may become more common again as your organisation starts migrating to Windows Server 2019.

The advantage of using even a down-version of Windows Server comes in the fact that versions of Windows from 2012 upwards all remain part of the Microsoft Long-term Servicing Branch (LTSB) support model. Consequently, by re-using the licenses your Plex install will receive security patches for many years to come, while remaining lighter than a client edition of Windows and – in the cae of Windows 10 – will save you from the 6-monthly ache of having to Feature Update Windows 10. In other words. Server Core gives you a stable platform to ‘set it and forget it’.

So, for these minority edge cases, an experiment was born to see Plex Media Server could in fact run on Windows Server Core.

Why Windows Server Core?

Partly because I’m a stickler for pain and partly because at ~5GB (Windows Server 2019), it represents a considerable disk and resource saving over the ~18GB of Windows 10. My Windows 10 VM Plex Server install, with Windows 10 Pro, Plex and its various database (but no local media assets) weighed in at 33GB (after defragging and compressing). Its RAM utilisation typically sitting between 1.4 GB and 1.8 GB (remember that it’s sitting at a user account lock screen most of the time, but a user is logged on non the less).

This gives us some numbers to define relevant success or failure of the experiment against.

How To

The new VM was setup with the following specs:

3 CPU Cores*

1024 MB Startup RAM with dynamic memory between 400 MB and 2048 MB

A 127 GB dynamic VHDX

Connected to the correct network

Set (in my case) to PXE boot and install from my build server

Windows Server 2019 Core as the install source

*I find that at 2 cores, Plex rides the CPU at 90% during library updates. With 3 cores, it is usually sub 40% and does make use of the available thread afforded from the extra CPU.

Minimising

Firstly, remove any unwanted Windows Features. My build server is configured to enable several features by default, so we’ll strip these off. Fewer features and less services mean a leaner VM footprint. Use Get-WindowsFeature in PowerShell* to view the state of play with yours and remove as appropriate. For example

Remove-WindowsFeature -Name Hyper-V

Remove-WindowsFeature -Name Windows-Defender

* At the comment prompt type “start powershell” and hit enter to launch a PowerShell console.

Note: Do not remove WOW64 from the install as you will require it to run Plex.

Preparing

If you aren’t automated, patch it, join it to the domian and make any registry and config changes that you need (such as IP addressing and enabling Remote Desktop).

Decide what account your Plex Server install will run in. Obviously, you’ll be sitting in an administrator account after install, and you don’t want to run Plex in that! I have a user account on the domain that has minimal permissions and access to multimedia shares. You should decide what will work for you.

Set the Windows Firewall so that you can perform remote management. Here are some examples of functions that you may wish to enable (they may differ depending on the Windows Server Edition). We need to enable File and Printer Sharing (SMB) access so that we can copy the Plex installer over to the VM from a management workstation.

Before you can run Plex Server, you will also need to enable Windows Media Foundation services.

Add-WindowsFeature -Name Server-Media-Foundation

Now jump to a Management machine, something with Windows 10 1809 and RSAT installed on it.

On the management machine, open Computer Management from the start button right click or by calling the MSC. Right click on “Computer Management (Local)” at the top of the left-hand pane and connect to the machine by hostname or IP Address. You can now:

Manage Task Scheduler

View the Event Logs

Manage Shared Folders

Manage Local Users & Groups

Note: If you are in a workgroup, you need to ensure that the user account and password used to open Computer Management matches the administrator account on the Plex VM. Otherwise you will see ‘Access Denied’. You will also need to have setup WinRM, which is beyond the scope of this article.

Auto Log-on

Installing on Windows Server will not change Plex’ behaviour. It will still run as a tray service even though there isn’t a systray to display its icon in. This means that the virtual machine must auto log-on at reboot in order to start Plex Server’s services.

To set auto-logon, from an administrator account add the following registry material.

Note: You can type regedit at the command prompt to gain access to the standard Windows registry editor if you prefer to do it manually.

To test whether you have successfully setup auto-logon, simply reboot the server VM.

Note: The password is inserted in fully readable plain text in the registry. Keep that in mind when designing the security for this account!

Install Plex Media Server

Use the following process to install Plex on the new Windows Server Core VM:

Log onto the VM using your preferred Plex user account. For the rest of this article we will call the username for that account “Plex”. This is to create the user account structures.

Download the latest Plex Server installer file from www.plex.tv.
Note: For some silly reason at the time of writing, the download link is in the page footer with the copyright. It’s almost as if they don’t want you to download it… but I digress.

In file explorer on the management machine, open a SMB share to the VM either using \\<FQDN>\c$ or \\<ipAddress>\c$. Copy the Plex installer file into \\<host>\c$\Users\Plex

Return to the VM via Remote Desktop or your Hypervisor, and ensure that you are logged on as the Plex user account. You should be a command prompt “C:\Users\Plex>”

If your user account is a member of the local administrators group: Type “Plex” and hit tab, it should auto complete the full file name of the Plex installer and hit return e.g.Plex-Media-Server-1.14.0.5470-9d51fdfaa.exe

If the Plex account is a standard user: Type “runas /noprofile /user:domain\adminUsername Plex-Media-Server-1.14.0.5470-9d51fdfaa.exe” and hit return.

Should you receive any errors from the installer, you can access the log file via the management machine at the following path to troubleshoot the problem:\\<host>\c$\Users\Plex\AppData\Local\Temp

Once the installer has finished, the Launch button will not doing anything as it is attempting to start the default web browser – and there isn’t a default web browser on Windows Server Core. Simply exit the installer to complete the installation.

Post-install

At this point you will have the Plex Server binary files installed, however unlike on a GUI install, Plex will not yet function correctly.

Drive Maps

Should you need to set up drive maps for media content you can use group policy or create local account mapped shares to your media files using

net use <driveLetter> \\server\share /persistent:yes

Auto-Start

Now that Plex is in installed, it is necessary to start its processes. As Windows Explorer (and the startup folder) does not exist to do this for us, you will have to set it up manually.

However, I was unable to get the event to fire at logon and the service never started.

Equally, I was unable to get an auto-run working from HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run on a non-administrative account, although your mileage may vary if you are using an administrative account.

In the interest of time, the quickest way to achieve this is to use the following procedure:

Change the Owner to the administrators group and cascade the ownership change to sub-objects

Set the Administrators group to have Full Control of ‘This key and subkeys’

OK back to Regedit

Edit the REG_SZ under AvailableShells so that you add cmd.exe /k “C:\Program Files (x86)\Plex\Plex Media Server\Plex Media Server.exe” into the Value data string e.g.cmd.exe /c "cd /d "%USERPROFILE%" & start cmd.exe /c "C:\Program Files (x86)\Plex\Plex Media Server\Plex Media Server.exe" & start cmd.exe /k runonce.exe /AlternateShellStartup"Note: The last command (each & is the start of a seperate command) to be executed will be the window on top after the boot completes.

Note: You cannot use SC as a mechanism to invoke the auto-start as Plex requires the user account to functionally access remote file shares. If all of your media is stored locally on the Plex Server VM then technically you could use SC and in this case you would not need to auto-logon the VM at all.

If you log-off and log-on again you should get the Plex Media Server.exe process running in taskmanager.

Adding the ability to Shutdown the VM

If you want your non-administrative user to shutdown the VM without having to log-off, log onto an administrator account and then perform the shutdown. You need to modify the local security policy (or Group Policy) to grant your low security account this right.

You can either

Export a modified policy as a template from your management machine in Local Security Policy (Security Settings > Local Policies > User Rights Assignment > Shut down the system) and then import it onto the Windows Server Core VM using secedit /configure /cfg <exportFilePath> /db secedit.sdb

Open Plex

To start using Plex as part of a new install. Return to your management machine and open a web browser and navigate to:

http://<ipAddress>:32400/web/

You should be presented with the beginning of the Plex configuration wizard in your browser. Do not not be surprised if Plex knows who you are based upon your IP address if you are an existing user. You should be able to sign-in and configure Plex as required based on it being a new install.

Migrating your Plex Server

If you wish to migrate an existing Plex Server into the VM, use the following procedure to perform the migration:

Ensure that both source and destination Plex Installs are running the same version

On the old server, export the entirety of the “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Plex, Inc.” registry key and import it onto the new server

On the new server, rename “C:\Users\Plex\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server” to “C:\Users\Plex\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server-OLD”

Copy the “C:\Users\Plex\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server” folder from the old server to the new server. This folder will be very large and the copy will be very slow as it contains a large number of files and folders. In my case some 662,915 files and folders totalling around 18 GB.

Ensure that your old Plex install remains offline

Reboot the new Plex VM

Test

Delete “C:\Users\Plex\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server-OLD”

The Results

At the beginning of the article, I outlined that the old Windows 10 VM disk was sitting at 33 GB with typical idle RAM use sitting around 1.4 GB.

After defragging and compressing the virtual disk for the Windows Server Core VM, the VHDX file size was 27 GB; a small improvement. RAM use was also better. Typical idle values of around 550 MB matched library updates sub-720 MB and observed highs around 900 MB.

Boot times for the VM are considerably faster compared to Windows 10, not that it is especially important for media consumption. As an early superficial observation, the library load times between a Smart TV and the Plex DLNA enumeration service appear snappier than under the previous install. I leave that as a subjective and not an empirical observation however.

So is it worth it? The answer to this should depend on your comfort level with managing Windows Server Core. If you want to play with Server Core to learn it, or are already familiar with it, then it is worth considering for the RAM saving alone. The promise of a long-term stable platform under LTSB servicing does allow you to “set it and forget it” and, if like me you are fed-up of contending with large 6-monthly full reinstalls of Windows 10 for no intrinsic gain. It really does offer a streamlined way to host Plex.

With that said, you do lose three practical things by using Server Core and not much else

The omnipresent tray icon which lets shortcut into the web GUI or manually initiate library scans (all of which you can do from the web UI).

The ability to open the web UI on the VM itself is lost.

Being able to troubleshoot with a GUI in Windows Explorer is occasionally useful. You must now use an intermediate management machine/VM to do this. For any admin who already manages Server Core, they will already have this environment. They will also be used to viewing the local server console as a weapon of last resort, not first resort as will be the case with the majority of GUI administrators.

Once working on Server Core, Plex is essentially managed exclusively through the web UI. There are only very occasional needs to interact with Windows Installer on the console during version upgrades. If you want your Plex VM to do something other than just Plex, then it probably isn’t worth considering going down this route. Should you think like a server admin however and prefer task isolation, then why do you need a GUI, Game Bar and Candy Crush saga to server multimedia content to your TVs? If you think like a savvy consumer, why do you need the extra licensing overhead?